As a part of our social media outreach campaign, United States Artists asked this year’s Fellows to record selfie-videos. The prompt was to share pithy observations on the virtues of aging with their art form. We wanted the videos to be both approachable and easy to produce. 

Liz Phillips (2025 USA Fellow, Music) sent in a video that was more than that. The video is a short experiment in form. It was edited with creative direction, archival footage, touched up sound EQ. There was some delighted surprise among the staff when we opened the file. Our social media request was fairly procedural, after all. To receive anything above and beyond that was cherry.

Asking for pat acknowledgements from someone with Liz Phillips’ lengthy experiences in early media technology was its own experiment, which meant the results were already a victory. This is a person who has been making art with new technology since she was a child. And the thing with technology, as with art, is that the process, the practice, is the artifact. We are speaking with someone who represents the Platonic ideal of this kind of process-artist in an age of information anxiety: approachable and complex; simultaneously legendary and obscure; someone who had to invent the tools with which she would create her unique sound art. This is what I learned about her in a conversation that took place in the Queens, NY, home she shares with her husband, composer Earl Howard.

Liz is animated when she talks about the editor of this video. Joan Logue is an old friend of hers, perhaps best known as the filmmaker behind 30 Second Spots: TV Commercials for Artists. Made in the 1980s, these videos are shot like PSAs and feature the likes of Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Orlan.

“Joan is a video artist who does portraits, and they're often very short. Like lots of them are thirty seconds, sixty seconds. That's what she's done for the past fifty years. All my really short videos were done by her,” Liz shares. “Sometimes there are three screens in one soundtrack. They show what's going on onstage from three angles, but put together, and it's the kind of thing I would never do because I don't think that way. And so it's been really good I get to work with her. When somebody asks for something short, I'm happy to ask her to help and I can afford to give her a little money now. I know we could all use it.”

It’s humbling to hear such matter-of-fact appraisals of financial need. Liz recently semi-retired from a long-term adjunct position at SUNY Purchase where she lectured in sculpture. When we talk about resources, that matter-of-fact tone gets more serious. We are aging and leveraging knowledge so everybody has what they need and can keep doing what they need to continue making meaningful work. But the resources also define the limitations of work when it comes to technology, as we all know. What's been less obvious is that there have to be limitations on how we exploit nature as an input, too.

Liz Phillips' interactive works interpret sound in nature. Undulations and psithurisms go only as far as humanity can allow them to; are only as sophisticated as the waves and the winds want them to be. The pastoral image evoked by her describing engaging with the great outdoors as a child in New Jersey is matched only by the technical novelty with which she described New York art scenes of the 1970s and 1980s: “The hot dog vendor in front of the Whitney was my favorite person to talk to about my installation there.”

This alloy of cultures is reflected in much of her work, including Inside the Watershed, a Philadelphia installation created in 2022 in collaboration with Annea Lockwood, another indelible icon in art and music. The installation features a wood sculpture designed as outdoor seating, placed along the promenade of the Schuylkill River Bank. It is animated through electronics and underwater pickups by the currents of the river that the sculpture overlooks. To sit in this piece and listen to the river with full body haptics is revelatory for anybody approaching nature as a valuable source of creative force. The whole show Watershed Moment, produced by Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences, is a statement on the health of our water systems and our relationship to eroding earth ecologies, but Liz, ever a consummate artist, does not pontificate when I ask about her relationship with nature.

She explains, “I can't preach because I also really like electronics. And synthesis. And I’m not bound to always use natural sound. I often process the sound. I originally thought of synthesis as the closest way to get to vibrations that you wanted to shift away from the physical.”

Liz doesn’t use air conditioning in her home. This is partly for environmental reasons but mostly, she says it’s for aesthetic reasons. “It's about noise, fresh air, and hearing birds.” She thinks about technology through aesthetics, eschewing higher performing technological tools for the virtues of lower fidelities: “I'm often using technology like MIDI control, which is kind of looked down upon these days as being slow. If you're doing things that interact with people, though, and you want people to recognize them, you're always slowing down everything. You're always curving and shaping the information into a slower form. So it doesn't matter to me that it functions slower. A lot of people who use digital material want, like, 150 sensors, or a thousand. They use a thousand sensors but I have two eyes. Do you really need more than two sensors? It looks lofi to people, but it actually works for me.”

The topic of lofi is a natural dovetail to talking about radio technology. Frequency interference. The body as an antenna. Liz’s work is not about technological attrition, however. Her work with radio frequencies and attenuated noise is not about slowing to zero or finding silence, nothing quite so nihilistic. It seems the work really is about engaging and paying attention.

“I use radios all the time and everything I'm running seems to run at different frequencies. And when we built this system on the wall here, it went into the megahertz. So we thought we were free of radio because radio interference was always an issue. And now that's where the cell phones are. So it's only worse. And I am really, really fascinated. Always have been. I think the first thing I built out of electronics myself was a crystal radio in elementary school. I was always fascinated by the amount of unseen waves that are in the air now. It’s an unheard of amount of bands in the air.

I have a funny story about one of the first shows I did. I was asked by Nam June Paik, who was a close friend and mentor, to show at his space for innovative studies in New York. I was about 18 or 19. In Bennington, Vermont, there was no interference where I went to school. When I got to New York, though, there were all these interfering radios for the first time. I was like [shocked expression], and he was like, ‘This is great.’ I was sweating, trying to get out of the range but he was like, ‘This is great!’” 

The effect of time and interference are transitive and intransitive within the work described. The times are changing and time changes things. Spatial orientation is a matter of placement, and being in a place necessarily orients a space. This idea of “effect” is a serious proposition. Not just because Liz Phillips’ work has tactility, has haptic resonance, but also because the artist exists in a social ecosystem. The cumulative knowledge and power of so many great thinking artists working together yields another effect: a lifestyle. Joan Logue, Annea Lockwood, Nam June Paik. Mary Lucier’s name comes up as another dear collaborator. Liz’s husband Earl Howard joins our conversation toward the end and we talk about licorice and the frustration as a blind art patron of being denied a touch dimension in museums. Their daughter Heidi Phillips Howard is working on a biography. This is anthropology. 

I quip that despite the lauds and lore of many, some of the artists have only recently become familiar. I tell her, for example, that I only heard Annea Lockwood’s name for the first time twenty years ago, despite her having been in the work for long before that. Liz quickly replies, “That’s because she stopped teaching twenty years ago. And that’s what I hope happens to me. It has to now, I guess. I have to. You have to. That's how you have to think of it. You have to.”